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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Running Dread Rock Dungeon

Yesterday I posted about possibly getting a skype game going with a few guys from my old gaming group. Most of these guys are in my table top Cormyr game, but one of them, who happens to be my best friend, lives a few hours away from us. I'm planning on running them through the first quadrant of Dread Rock to begin. It'll be a good way for me to really playtest it out with a good group of veteran old school players. We created characters late last night on skype.

One of my players is running a dwarf with an 18 CON, which in 2e means at 1st level he has ridiculous bonuses to his saves vs poison, staves, rods, wands, and spells. On top of it all he's playing a multi-class thief with a high find/remove traps and open locks. And of course, his high CON means he has a huge bonus to his hit points. I told him his nickname was going to be Seagal (a reference to the film Hard to Kill). This player was pretty legendary for us back in the day when we went through two underdark crawls back to back in Undermountain and Night Below. He really shines in the dungeon environment as a player, despite his often reckless behavior in them. Usually the results are pretty hilarious when he's involved in a dungeon crawl.

My best friend is running a specialist mage (necromancer) who happens to hate the undead. He's making it his mission to hunt down and destroy undead and those who would defile the dead by raising/animating them. An interesting choice to play considering necromancers can't cast spells from enchantment/charm and illusion schools, which means no Sleep spell at 1st level, which we know is usually the saving grace of any low level mage. Keeping him alive for a while is going to be difficult.

I have one more player that will be joining us, but we're not sure what he'll be playing at this point. I'm going to run a Fighter NPC with the party, and of course, I'm sure they'll opt to shop around for some hirelings. I'm pretty anxious to give Dread Rock a spin in actual play. I understand quite a few people have downloaded the first quadrant to run in their games. If you've been running Dread Rock at all, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, so feel free to drop me a line at robertchandler AT gmail DOT com, or just comment here on the blog somewhere.